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Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions


JorgeA

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I see it more as a "Google Chrome, Firefox and all of Apple only have to support one version (the latest) of their software, and yet we're supporting versions that are nearly a decade out of date

Easy solution: stop supporting them, and, even better, shrink the support window and take it out of the price (we all remember that the support cost is included in the price, right?). What do these monthly patches contribute anyway? If I rollback to Office 2003 SP3, which came out 5.5 years ago, would I really notice a difference?

which makes it expensive for businesses to upgrade (because they become dependent on the product),

So we admit that Microsoft breaks functionality between versions, thus adding to the motivation to actively resist upgrading. Protip: breaking the product more often with more releases doesn't reduce support and development costs, it increases them!

and expensive to fix (because we have to security fix the product multiple times for every vulnerability we find)

This is a problem of Microsoft's own making. Stop supporting products for 10 years and stop building said support into the price tag and then we can talk. Part of the selling point of Office used to be its long support window. Take that away but keep the price the same or higher and what's the motivation to buy?

and it's expensive to support (because we have to train customer support how to do stuff in the customer's version of Office).

I thought Microsoft was supposed to hire the best and the brightest. Even at the basic support level I'd expect to find people who could handle multiple versions of Office. Hell all you really need is Google and some patience for most things. But I know how things are. Microsoft low level support staff is clueless about even the latest version of Office so I don't see how not training people for other versions increases cost.

It's becoming alarming that the #1 argument these days is, "You should put up with these regressions because Microsoft makes more money from them." Oh, okay. So when Honda sells me a $30,000 car with no seatbelts, radio, or A/C and puts a 3 cylinder engine in because it's cheaper, I should let them slide because it's easier for them and they make more money.

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Imagine the bright future in the biz - Every year a new Office interface, because MS has killed off everything except Office 365.

And breaking VBA macros to boot! And breaking third party software! Actually, it would be a liability developing for Office in the first place.

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Can you even use old software with 365 or does it need to be rewritten? Does 365 support the calls used by scripts, like "objExcel"?

As far as I know yes. Office 365 is splitted into two parts. Web and desktop. The web version is totally gimped, but the desktop version is pretty much Office 2013.

Anyway, targetting Office for development is now madness. Oh, Microsoft is making quite a track record in scaring devs!

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It's becoming alarming that the #1 argument these days is, "You should put up with these regressions because Microsoft makes more money from them." Oh, okay. So when Honda sells me a $30,000 car with no seatbelts, radio, or A/C and puts a 3 cylinder engine in because it's cheaper, I should let them slide because it's easier for them and they make more money.

I find the cutification of corporations (especially the big IT three, MS, Apple, Google, because there it's so prevalent) pretty much disgusting. They make more money than the GDP of most countries on Earth, yet the customers are supposed to feel bad about them supporting a product you paid for. And if they screw up, we're are supposed to cuddle up the poor corp, it's a goodly good conglomerate after all, and promise that we will pay up for the next fabulous product. And if you don't do this, then you're an enabler of "legacy".

"Legacy" is the dirty word par excellence anyway. How dare you to let your investment amortize! That's EVIL!

Edited by Formfiller
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Archos Intros Platinum Tablet Line; Two Now, One in April ( Tom's Hardware 2013-02-15 )

Archos was one of the solid alternatives in MP3 players against iPods and Zune and made some cool devices. They appear to be very competent at these form factors and will become yet another hurdle for Microsoft to try to pass up the ladder to marketshare. So this is more bad news for Microsoft and their ridiculous Plan A to Destroy Windows and force everyone into Metro where they will fall hopelessly head-over-heels in love with Windows 8 and abandon all others flocking to everything Ballmer and company have to offer.

Nokia to focus on Lumia phones in Barcelona. Windows 8 Pro tablet to follow later? ( Windows Phone Central 2013-02-15 )

Reason for the tablet delay? We've heard from some industry insiders who believe Nokia, like Samsung, are moving away from an RT tablet strategy and instead are opting to 'go Pro' meaning a full Windows 8 device. That certainly seems plausible as the Surface RT appears to have locked up that market.Suh a change in focus could also explain the delay as presumably Nokia would need more time in working with a full--fledged desktop OS.

This is actually a followup to the upthread Nokia discussion ( Nokia Mistakenly Reveals Lumia Windows RT Tablet ) which Thurrott first noted was a fake. I guess Nokia is trying to avoid making the potential mistake I pointed out ...

... But now they know, and will have no excuse if the thing ships and dies, especially considering the fact other OEMs scrapped their RT products, and with the x86 Surface Pro finally released which will attract most potential buyers, except for the handful that only care about battery life or for some reason want ARM in particular. The point being, by merely glancing at the list below, one can easily see that Nokia cannot afford many more mistakes.

EDIT: typos

Edited by CharlotteTheHarlot
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Office 2013 EULA prevents users from moving software to another PC ( NeoWin 2013-02-15 )

Office 13 Retail May Be Bound to One PC Forever ( Tom's Hardware 2013-02-14 )

Office 2013 retail licensing change ties suite to specific PC forever ( ComputerWorld 2013-02-15 )

Retail Copies of Office 2013 Are Tied To a Single Computer Forever ( SlashDot 2013-02-13 )

Big changes in Office 2013 and Office 365 test Microsoft customers' loyalty ( Ed Bott 2013-02-15 )

And the fallout is just beginning for Microsoft over their latest blunder which is a clearly cynical stunt aimed at forcing people into Office 364. They really are out of control. This is the all-in strategy, going for the end-zone even as they are only recently out from under the government oversight from around 2000. They are un-handcuffed and unrestrained now and are going whole hog and no-one will tell them otherwise. No wonder they scoffed at over a year's worth of intense criticism about the Start Menu and Metro, they have a huge corporate strategy in place and that was but a small piece of the plan. This should really get interesting, but also very sad because I don't think there is any trace of sanity left up there and we will likely see the end of Microsoft as we knew her in the next couple of years. Windows would have been saved if Microsoft had been broken up many years ago, set aside as a firewalled spin-off company. Can anyone still believe that the OS division isn't completely intertwined with all other aspects of the company now? Do independent developers who do not pay duty and tribute to the Redmond overlords really have a fair shot at the computers that use Windows? If yes, for how much longer? Once the OS is treated the same as an application then it is no longer an operating system, but is a Microsoft software facilitator. Windows 8 and Metro are nothing if not enablers for Microsoft, the company. They are for their benefit alone.

In the last link above, Ed Bott is once again battling Paul Thurrott in a steel cage deathmatch for title of World's Foremost MicroZealot ...

Ed Bott ( admitting their Cynical Plan ) ... That last restriction is the one that has Office users howling the most. And Microsoft’s answer is simple: If you want to move Office licenses between PCs, buy one of the subscription editions, which makes the process practically painless.

Well there it is in plain English. Interesting how Microsoft has to get surrogates to clearly spell it out rather than doing it themselves. Maybe they are afraid of Ballmer yelling out: "Subscription! Subscription! Subscription!"

Ed Bott ( drinking while posting ) ... The biggest losers in this product transition are software pirates, who have grown fat and rich buying multiple product keys from Microsoft services like TechNet and MSDN and then reselling them to unsuspecting customers. The new retail editions aren’t available through those IT-focused channels.

Yep, got it. Software pirates will feel the pain, sure. So when all is said and done, will the new evil plan cause more or less piracy? D'oh. Pretty crazy thing to say really, it is self-evident that legitimate owners are going to be negatively impacted, not a chance a pirate will be affected nor would they even care. If anything they will soon multiply in number many times over and probably earn profit selling the same stupid thing that Microsoft used to sell. At the end of the day, just as with Windows 8 they will net gain more ill will than ever before, turning lifelong customers against them.

Ed Bott ( parroting the Company Line ) ... For PC traditionalists, the sticker shock that comes with trying to buy a conventional perpetual license for Office is sure to cause some anger. From what I can see, Microsoft is fully prepared for that reaction and plans to stick to its guns. It sees perpetual licenses as a dying business, one that it can’t wait to drop.

This sudden shift in strategy is emblematic of the new Microsoft, which isn’t afraid to make big changes that would never have been tolerated at staid old Microsoft. In fact, what Microsoft is doing with Office 2013 and Office 365 is disrupting its own business, before someone else does it to them.

It is so much better to bleed them like stuck pigs, yay, subscription models!.

IMHO, this is a very bad trend and is apparently Business 101 at schools now ( Ethics 101 is an elective ), where the concept of a quality one-time product is considered old-fashioned and un-sustainable ( e.g., the vendor that sells crafts he carved by hand, who is directly accountable to the customer ) being replaced with the subscription service idea of money sucked directly out of an account subject to changes later that are non-beneficial to the customer. I believe this used to be called spreadsheet economics where bean-counters sit around stuck in spreadsheets all day juggling numbers by tweaking formulas in cells to "maximize" revenues, the results coming from doing only the easy things: reduced service, quality, warranty, R&D, etc, and all naturally coming at the expense of the customer. The problem is that this business model makes them impervious to customer feedback since the customers are little more than a name heading a row of cells. A "Product" literally becomes the classical "Widget" and what it is happens to be truly irrelevant. The other problem is that the company that goes this route also becomes indistinguishable from all others since it is all a big blur of competing corporate headquarters more interested in Wall Street than Main Street, none having any character or soul, and literally existing only on paper where with a few strokes of a pen the whole structure is re-arranged again, making believe they have changed something and the cycle repeats all over. There is no longer any accountability from company to customer, and this is exactly how they like it. Watch later for employee headcount reduction as a sure sign that the company is suffering from Plan A failure after having run out of "easy things" in their spreadsheet to do. Layoffs, reduction of employee benefits and other frills will get them some temporary headroom in the stock price. After that Ballmer leaves no doubt with all his billions intact while Gates remains and they bring in an external CEO to fix things up who will know nothing at all about the intrinsic problems rooted in Redmond, and the cycle repeats until people figure out the fish rots from the head down. These kind of actions can keep them on life-support for quite a while, in the meantime the computerized world captive to their monopoly continues to suffer at their hands. Welcome to Big Blue, The Next Generation.

P.S. A few sites notably absent thus far, PC Mag, The Register and The Verge. But I suspect articles are in the works. Pretty much all the commenters are aghast over this, including commenters even at NeoWin! ...

EDIT: updated image URL, and again

Edited by CharlotteTheHarlot
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If I were the maker of an alternative commercial office applications suite, I'd be budgeting extra advertising $$$ right now. This is the time to pounce, the moment when the shock is biggest.

One can hope. I tried LibreOffice recently ( and had a few versions of OpenOffice previously ). I just cannot shake the feeling that it is not ready yet, but that may just be me. Still, I have all the MS Office versions and frankly doubt Microsoft will ever develop something further in Office requiring a purchase of a later version. They'll have to do much more than a fancy ZIP file disguised as an Office .XLSx to get me interested again.

Can you believe what has elapsed just in the past year and a half? They have taken their two most important cash cows which just happen to be the two most formidable juggernauts in all personal computer history, Windows and Office and not only destroyed them but simultaneously declared war on their most loyal users!

I know I can't believe it. The only thing I remember of this magnitude before was when IBM turned the industry upside down with MCA in the PS/2 and open hostility erupted eventually killing their leadership finally resulting in them selling off the PC division and exiting completely. If you lived in the Apple universe then perhaps Jobs being squeezed out was a large event also. But this one with Microsoft is absolutely stunning to me. It wouldn't be such a big deal if they hadn't first elbowed their way into the OS monopoly and assumed leadership. This is what makes this so distasteful. It is a violation of their position of responsibility and now borders on criminal.

I hope some day the tale is written and we learn who were the architects of this disaster. I want names.

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Ed Bott ( drinking while posting ) ... The biggest losers in this product transition are software pirates, who have grown fat and rich buying multiple product keys from Microsoft services like TechNet and MSDN and then reselling them to unsuspecting customers. The new retail editions aren’t available through those IT-focused channels.

I'm unfamiliar with this model; can someone elaborate? I know you get licence keys via MSDN but my perception was the impact of their spread was minimal. This model doesn't sound scalable at all but I may be ignorant.

Taking it a bit further, why even bother buying the MSDN subscriptions? Why not just use the KMS activators with the trial edition and call it a day? This idea sounds more scalable to me.

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The icing on the cake is that even Office 365 "Home Premium" (the 99$ - 5 devices home version) seems to be somewhat of a ploy to force people onto the more expensive subscriptions. Here are licensing terms:

Only one person at a time may use the software on each licensed computer or licensed device. The service/software may not be used for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities.

Basically you're only allowed to make your homework with it!

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I'm unfamiliar with this model; can someone elaborate? I know you get licence keys via MSDN but my perception was the impact of their spread was minimal. This model doesn't sound scalable at all but I may be ignorant.

Taking it a bit further, why even bother buying the MSDN subscriptions? Why not just use the KMS activators with the trial edition and call it a day? This idea sounds more scalable to me.

Well, it's all pretty simple: He is talking crap to justify Microsoft. The software pirate is the only bogey man that he could come up with.

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As I said on Channel9, what I find so funny, is that they are at their "most evil" towards the customers, when they have finally got some competition.

Quite the strategy.

You got some kind of patience on that thread my friend.

If evildictait​or isn't a Moonie Softie, then he should definitely change his avatar to something like this ...

keflgY8.jpggTrS0Gg.jpg

( originals 1, 2 )

EDIT: updated image URLs

Edited by CharlotteTheHarlot
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